Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

would have shaken his head over these words—for it was precisely fromhis studies of the skeleton of the vertebrates and the structure of plants thatGoethe’s life was flooded, even in his eighties, with an awe which retainedmuch of the character of a juvenile ecstasy. Indeed, Goethe at eighty wouldnot have written the words which Thoreau wrote at thirty-three:In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I wasall alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction … !As the years passed, Thoreau increasingly mourned his lost youthand the intoxication which nature had afforded him then. For a time the hummingof the telegraph wires aroused transports; it was his “redeemer”; thenthey too lost their peculiar powers. Finally, in his last years he turned fromthe almost passive notation of the phenomena about him and introducedinto his observations an element of progression and exploration into theunknown. He counted the rings in stumps and made notes on the successionof trees. Those who are conversant with these things tell us that he wasdiscovering the science of ecology. He seems, however, to have derived nowarming satisfaction from this innovation; his notes lie buried in his journaland the work is repeated independently by others.I am eager to arrive at all the things that call forth our admirationfor Thoreau, but I must delay a moment to point out that we have brushedagainst two traits in him which are not characteristic of the American: thefixed orientation toward childhood and the view of nature as engaged inclose personal conversation with man. These are characteristic, however, ofthe region from which he came.A portion of Massachusetts and several states of our South are enclavesor residual areas of European feeling. They were cut off, or resolutelycut themselves off, from the advancing tide of the country’s modes of consciousness.Place, environment, relations, repetitions are the breath of theirbeing. One evidence of it is a constant preoccupation with how old one isand a striking obsession with early youth (how many of the brilliant novelswhich have lately come to us from the South turn upon childhood). In NewYork and Chicago and the West, one’s age is of relatively little importance;those who are active between twenty-five and sixty are contemporaries.They dine and dance and work and enjoy themselves together. This is boundup with the American sense of time, which I shall develop in later lectures.Time is something we create, we call into being, not something we submitto—an order outside us.214